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Thanks to Meika and Christina of my novel critique group, the Pigasus Pen (and many, many others), the Capital City Writers Association held another fabulous Write on the Red Cedar conference last weekend! Victoria and I joined the other half of our team for a set of writing workshops, which I won't summarize here, because you can probably download some podcasts and exciting PowerPoint slides of that stuff. I'm here to report back on the weird things you have to be there to pick up.

Pitching Isn't So Bad
I'll try just about anything once, even things that I hear can involve intensely fast minutes of terror, vomiting, screaming... you know, like a really good roller coaster. Write on the Red Cedar invited three literary agents to hear writers' pitches for a total of eight minutes each.

I get extremely nervous speaking to someone I haven't met before one-on-one, and I'd never described my completed manuscript to an industry professional, so... of course I sign…

This weekend, I have an appointment (all eight minutes of it!) with a seriously hip literary agent, during the Write on the Red Cedar conference. Stuff's getting real! I've had to think hard about how to describe my 118,000-word novel in five minutes or less. I've practiced with friends and by recording myself, and here is one of my takes. Here goes...

Next week, I'll report back on how it went!

Update: The pitch session was lovely! The words that came out of my mouth sitting face to face with an agent were different than what I said here. I'm pretty sure I misused the term "high concept" in this video, so I hope I didn't say that. I don't really remember! Although I was nervous, it was very useful having human feedback as I spoke. I already feel better able to describe my novel in my query, which I'll work on revising this weekend. I'll post a recap of things I learned at the conference on Tuesday.

When stars die, we can become disoriented. We don't know why we are crying. We did not know this person in our "real" life, our outer life, where we make two-way eye contact with other humans and touch hands and breathe in scent and converse with our voices through shared air.

We never even met the person behind the stage persona, the one who is dead while the recordings remain. Why do we mourn?

I can't speak for everyone else. Maybe we all have our own reasons. For me, I have begun to recognize that the voices of rock stars--the singing voices of the music that has set the rhythm and tone of my life, like it or not, flowing through my subconscious and knitting the stories that hold and shape my moods and innermost thoughts--become points of orientation for me, maybe taken for granted and unnoticed most of the time, like constellations in the night sky, and it doesn't matter that they are distant, it doesn't matter if they are just an illusion, or echoes of …